Zalman’s CNPS9700 has held the top spot in the air-cooling category of our cooler charts for the past 18 months now. This makes it a reference against which all new products tested in this comparison are measured. Since the Zalman isn’t exactly a bargain at a price of nearly $80, many buyers choose less expensive alternatives—often regretting their choice later. In the fourth part of our CPU Cooler Charts 2008, we take a look at six new coolers. We’ve also included Zalman’s new CNPS9700 LED to see if it can still keep up with the newer models.
We got a good deal of reader feedback asking us for our opinion on Xigmatek’s products, which can often be found at much lower prices than competing coolers. For this reason we decided to include the company’s two most popular models, the HDT-S1283 and the XP-S964, in our comparison.
Previous installments of this series :
- CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 1—Losing your Cool ?
- CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 2—Junk or Jewel ?
- CPU Cooler Charts 2008, Part 3—Are Box Coolers any Good ?
| 3R System | Antazone | Arctic Cooling |
| Asus | Cooler Master | Coolink |
| CoolJag | EKL | Foxconn |
| Gigabyte | Glacialtech | Hiper |
| JouJye Dynatron | MSI | Nexus |
| Noctua | OCZ | Scythe |
| Silentmaxx | Silverstone | Spire |
| Tacens | Thermaltake | Titan |
| Verax | Xigmatek | Zalman |
| Zaward | Zerotherm |
If you are interested in our test methodology and how we rate the products, feel free to read up on these points here :
- Can Low-Cost Coolers Compete?
- Xigmatek HDT S1283: Cool, Not Quiet
- Xigmatek XP S964: You Get What You Pay For
- Scythe's Mugen: A Fair Deal
- Verax Helado 2 PWM-T: Simply Too Expensive
- Zalman CNPS9700 LED: The Reference Cooler
- Coolink Silentator: Licensed by Noctua
- Tom's Hardware Performance Results
- Cooling Performance
- Noise
- Weight and Fan Speed
- Conclusion: Xigmatek Snags the Recommended Buy Award
The page link to the winning cooler clearly says "Cool, not quiet". Unless you keep your PC in a cupboard then noise should play a much larger factor in the cooler choice. What's the point of buying high performance sound cards with lower noise floors if we have to sit and listen to the drone of our system fans at the same time?
Any fool can stick a high RPM fan on a hunk of metal and cool a CPU. Zalman's winning formula is the ability to do that at very low volume levels - and they are still the clear winners in the air cooling market. Price seems to play too much of a factor in these reviews - scripming in your cooler is a false economy - if you buy one that is too lound and therefore have to go out and buy another then you may as well have bought a decent on in the first place. Also if an extra £10 gets you from noisy to silent then that is a price well worth paying.
Xigmatek? Really?
Why not Thermalright Ultra-120, especially not the extreme version too!
That's what's widely regarded as the top of the bunch still!
And no Tuniq Tower either!!
What were you thinking??
If you look at the charts the Scythe Ninja Rev. B is included, the temperature readings are taken from previous tests Tom's did.
Though I do agree that the Thermalright Ultra-120 should have been included.
Using speedfan I am able to idle at 45C with a low fan speed and get as low as 33C at 90% fan speed. Running at 100% I never exceed 55C at full load. Now the stock cooler is a little intrusive at 100%, but using speedfan to knock it back to 90% makes it perfectly acceptable.
I can understand that the Zalman is some pretty computer porn, but really, why bother? It would have been good to see a better quality review, especially against the stock manufacturer's cooler as a reference.
I am not against aftermarket coolers, per se - I remover an AC7 to use the stock intel just to see how it would perform - and I must say I am impressed.
Come on THG - a bit more effort and this 'test' could have had some validity - it reads like 'my favourite cooler is...'